Long-Term Barriers to Economic DevelopmentEnrico Spolaore and Romain Wacziarg Chapter 03 in Handbook of Economic Growth, 2014, vol. 2, pp 121-176 from Elsevier Abstract: What obstacles prevent the most productive technologies from spreading to less developed economies from the world’s technological frontier? In this paper, we seek to shed light on this question by quantifying the geographic and human barriers to the transmission of technologies. We argue that the intergenerational transmission of human traits, particularly culturally transmitted traits, has led to divergence between populations over the course of history. In turn, this divergence has introduced barriers to the diffusion of technologies across societies. We provide measures of historical and genealogical distances between populations, and document how such distances, relative to the world’s technological frontier, act as barriers to the diffusion of development and of specific innovations. We provide an interpretation of these results in the context of an emerging literature seeking to understand variation in economic development as the result of factors rooted deep in history. Keywords: Long-run growth; Genetic distance; Intergenerational transmission; Diffusion of innovations (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:grochp:2-121 DOI: 10.1016/B978-0-444-53538-2.00003-4 Access Statistics for this chapter More chapters in Handbook of Economic Growth from Elsevier |
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